ANTHR 3425 - Anthropology of the University

(SBA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

D. Greenwood.

Turning an anthropological gaze on the contemporary university as a social and cultural system, this seminar involves an examination of the convergences and divergences between the trajectories of the sciences and engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences in contemporary universities and some international comparisons with the trajectories of universities around the world. The overall aim is to link an ethnographic analysis of the microstructures of departmental differentiation, professional hegemonies, and local financing with the larger-scale processes of transformation of universities’ place in society under the pressures of corporativization, globalization, and competition from a host of alternative higher education institutions.